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May 27, 2016

Now Utilties

Once upon a time, there was some cool 3rd party utility software on the Macintosh. One of my all time favorites was Now Utilities by Now Software available only for System 7. It made the computer more productive.

MacUser named it one of the "Top 100 Products for 1990."

On November 10, 1997, Qualcomm Incorporated purchased Now Software. In 1999, Power On Software purchased the company. The last known version of Now Utilities was version 6.5

Some of the functionality in Now Utilities has been integrated into Mac OS X. Their are some 3rd party applications that fill in the gap. Default Folder X and Path Finder 7 seem to be good alternatives to Now Utilities.

Here is the list of the seven utilities that were included with Now Utilities 6.0 software and the equivalent replacement available today. (I included a brief description of the original documents.)

Now AutoType

Now AutoType lets you create macros for frequently typed words and phrases. It also watches what you type and creates macros for your frequently typed words and phrases for you automatically.

TextExpander and Keyboard Maestro are the better solutions today. Although, I am interested in learning more about the "create macros" functionality that was in Now AutoType.

Now Tabs

Now Tabs places a tab bar at the bottom of the screen. You can really clean up your desktop by dragging open windows to the tab bar where they're stored as tabs.

Sounds familiar? That's what Launchbar does in MacOs X. There are 1,000 features in one application, certainly worth looking into.

Now Shortcuts

Now Shortcuts lets you hold down a modifier key (such as control) and click on a file or folder in the Finder. When you release the mouse button a menu of choices like duplicate, lock, share, and make alias will pop-up - choose an item for a "shortcut" way to manage files and folders.

Today a simple right click is all you need.

Now Super Boomerang

Makes it easy to access the most recent files/folder menus in the Apple Menu or in Open/Save dialog boxes.

Now Startup Manager

Easy way to manage what extensions should load when you start up your computer. This is useful when your Macintosh crashes during startup.

LaunchControl - With LaunchControl you see all services and their respective status at a glance. Invalid services are highlighted and a problem description is provided. You can enable or disable services with a single click. The same goes for loading, unloading, and ad-hoc starting. A long list of jobs may be filtered.

Now WYSIWYG Menus

Now WYSIWYG Menus lets you see fonts in their actual typefaces when you pull down the Font menu in applications. The Size and Style menus will also display the currently-selected font in the available sizes and styles, so you can always choose fonts and styles quickly said know what the results will look like.

WYSIWYG Font menus is built into many popular Macintosh applications.

Now QuickFiler

Easy way to compress files. Now QuickFiler provides an alternate view of your disks, folders, and files in which you can perform all standard file- management functions. It also has a sophisticated Find command and can compress files on demand or in the background.

Path Finder 7 - Become a master of file management with Path Finder 7! Take full control over your file system! Save your time and work how you want! Say goodbye to the days of weak file management. With Path Finder 7, it's your files, your way.

Now Save

Now Save adds additional functionality to the Save box, including the ability to auto-save in any application. Use the Key Capture function of Now Save to record all of your keystrokes to a text file in case of crash.

Now Folder Menus

Now Folder Menu lets you "pop up" a menu of any folder's or volumes' content just by clicking on the item and holding down the mouse button. By default, Now FolderMenus displays arrows on the icons of folders and volumes to indicate that you can pop up a menu to view their contents. You can then view the contents of nested folders, and open folders or documents within folders by selecting them and releasing the mouse button.

Comments

Joachim Guentert

September 11, 2016.

Being an avid Mac veteran too, I found your post when searching for "Now Utilities" today which I'm still missing after 20 years of Mac experience – especially "Super Boomerang" which was sooo much more reliable in finding recently opened files than "Default Folder." I could recommend "Fresh" (http://www.ironicsoftware.com/fresh/) or "Trickster" (https://www.apparentsoft.com/trickster/) for the same purpose but none of them works that perfect as "Super Boomerang" did which might be related to the change of Mac OS.
Nevertheless I'm happy to have found your site. It's bookmarked for every week access now… :) Thank you very much for your interesting posts! Best from Switzerland. Jo